THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST
IN view of the many generalizations now circulating about literature in the United States, it might be interesting, or even instructive, to examine the specific case of a relatively young man with a published novel of authentic value. It is necessary, for this pur¬pose, to limit the investigation to a be¬ginning writer, in fact, to a first novel. Its purpose will be to discover exactly the conditions which here await a fresh and actual literature. It is, almost invariably, character¬istic of a novelist of value that he should not, initially, be situated in a material ease. Young men with money, and post-graduate honors, do not commonly turn to the novel, but to criticism and poetry. Young men who make their bow in the better known magazines hardly ever write novels—worth a thought at all. Those who do; surprisingly, write good books produce them in hours taken from widely other necessary tasks; or in times of sickness and forced idle¬ness. Such an individual, pouring into his pages everything, elsewhere suppressed, that he integrally is, fi¬nally has a manuscript put together and typewritten with an infinite pains and an immeasurable difficulty; it is posted or carried to a publisher; and, after a space of something like six weeks, he has a—for him—stupen¬dous letter of acceptance. This novel, which we are under¬standing as thoroughly. worth doing, will, of course, be different from the flood of readily marketable fictions; it will probably be tragic, or, at the least, satirical, in spirit; and there is a chance that the manner of its writ¬ing will, too, have aspects of original¬ity. The result of all this will be that the publisher, almost tearful over his unselfish nobility, will call the writ- er's attention to the fact that his book, while it may accomplish a critical suc¬cess, can have little or no sale. The inevitable deduction will be re¬flected in the rate of the royalty : the most honest payment possible will be five per cent. on the first two thousand copies, with two and a half per cent. more after that, and, perhaps, a future increase to ten per cent. This novel, submitted toward the end of Septem¬ber—novels are apt to be written through the open months—will be ac¬cepted about November first. By that time the publisher's spring list must be pretty well in hand—with the pres¬ent manufacturing conditions a num¬ber of the spring books will be al¬ready, mechanically, under way—and the novel we are considering set for publication next fall. It will, then, appear a year after it was submitted; and, in the general mode of the publishing business, a royalty report will be returned three months later. The report will be for- warded in three months, and the half yearly payment made in six. This novel, then, let us say, was actually begun late in the winter of nineteen hundred and nineteen and, finished, it was submitted—this is very rapid— in the fall of that year. It was pub¬lished in the autumn of nineteen twenty, and the first sum of money obtained from it sometime in the April or May of nineteen hundred and twenty-one, or two years after the put¬ting of a pen to paper. This novel, if it is individual and vigorously fine—unless it happens to be carried on the wave of a chance popular cause—must be, as a material property, a failure. If, for instance, two thousand copies are sold, the pub¬lisher will about get his money back; and, if its retail price is two dollars, after two years the writer will receive two hundred dollars. If four thou¬sand are sold, the publisher, thinking himself well out of it, will make a lit¬tle, and the writer will have the sum of five hundred dollars. During that period, you see, while he may, perhaps, write two other novels, he can have none published. A second will, if he is fortunate, be in preparation for appearance not soon¬er than six months after the first came out . . . that is the best he can hope for. Meanwhile, he is at the necessary employment of finding a living for himself and, perhaps, two or three others. The temperament of a novel¬ist, his dream of peace, leads him quickly to marriage. If he is able he will, first, support himself by contri¬butions to magazines of generous pay¬ments. Superficially, that has an ap¬pearance of contributing to his main desire, the writing of novels; but, in reality, it is not only tragically far from that but actually destructive to his ability as a novelist. It would be closer to his occupation if he labored in the pit of a steel mill; for there, at least, he would come in contact with the material of his aim. He might be, again, he often is, em- ployed in writing for newspapers, on special or general assignments, or even in a moderate editorial capacity. But that, while it is a better prepara¬tion for the novel than that offered by the public taste in short stories, breaks his power of concentration upon the longer ventures. There is hardly a novelist with a training in newspaper offices whose style is not sharp and brittle; it is, through habit, focussed on incidentals rather than on the whole. And of the other multitudi¬nous occupations by the means of which beginning novelists manage to keep themselves alive nothing in de¬tail need be said. My own experience, attended by some unusually fortunate circum¬stances, in the main followed this course. The Lay Anthony—to refer to it only in the terms of its reviews— was, as a first book, quite generously noticed. I was to get a five per cent. royalty after a preliminary thousand copies were sold- *hen. in, I think, St) nineteen hundred and fourteen, a sale of a thousand would repay the pub¬lisher—and . .. some nine hundred were bought. I do not remember the terms of the contract for Mountain Blood, brought out a year afterward; but I recall very sharply that it did not pay me a penny then. I sold three papers of a type I liked to a magazine the reverse of popular, and got from them, in a diminishing scale, fifteen, twelve and a half and ten dollars. That brought me well into nineteen sixteen, but—where my novels were concerned—nowhere near a material solvency. The fortunate circum¬stances alluded to, in connection with myself, were a comfortable place to live, an unconquerable laxness in whatever I failed to like or only half liked, and George Horace Lorimer. But all that, necessary as an explana¬tory note to my comments, is a digres¬sion. The point is that, in the United States, the western world, of the pres ent, the profession of a novelist sim¬ply does not exist. The novel, dif¬ferent from the lyrical measures of poetry or the compactness of essays and critical papers, requires a long time for its composition; it needs close thought and reasoning, yes, and peace, quiet; and such conditions, today, are expensive. The good young novel is the product of passion and resent¬ment and a bitterness at injustice— qualities missed by the rich—or it is made of a dream of loveliness desir¬able in its shining remoteness from the immediate scene. Things like those, beautiful and far away, or close and tragic, people, the public, do not like and will not pay for. The spectacle of suffering, so purifying to the individual, the mass neither will nor can support. And— but perhaps it is only my conviction— fine novels can be constructed from one of two sources, either they present the heroic or cowardly individual op¬posed to hopeless odds and death; or they have to do with that which was beautiful and is lost. There is, I feel, nothing else worth an inattentive curse. The novel, itself a modern affair, is a necessary victim of modern circum¬stances: men no longer have any lei¬sure, any quiet, any interruption of the waste of their beings. Individuals, individual minds, are disappearing in the confusion following the humani¬tarian welter of the nineteenth cen¬tury. Any art is, in essence, aristo¬cratic, proud, free from the cheapness of the mob; and now the mob, like a turbid and dead sea, is over all the land. There is, in the scheme of the pres¬ent, no need, no general need, for truthful or delicate novels. Those that are, hopefully, produced, have a short or a long life in a very limited sphere. A number of fine novels, when the truth or a delicacy of vision is never for a sentence departed from, will, after a succession of books and years, undoubtedly afford a dignified, but hardly plentiful, living. With them, as well, a reputation for integ¬rity, for honesty and courage, will grow and fix itself in men's minds; and that is a great and a happy accomplishment. That, however, lies in the distant future; the present is devastating; and there isn't, in the United States, even the small pension that fell to Mr. Con¬rad. What, specially, makes this con¬dition sad is the fact that its grimness is accompanied by the most hearten¬ing proclamations and pretensions. The whole American world, it is made to appear, is waiting impatiently with laurels and gold for distinguished na¬tive creative writers. It is a situation that would be resembled by accom¬panying a dark secretive play with the loud music of a Follies Review. A cast clamor of hypocrisy, of self- laudation, has always resounded about the arts of music and literature; the titles of admirable novels are, seemingly, on all sentient lips; the titles are, yes and even rude ideas of the plans of writing; a few actual vol¬umes are prominent upon library tables . . . but that is as far as it goes. The novels themselves, like the de¬frauded relatives of prosperous and comfortable families, are not wanted around. It isn't pleasant for the snug¬ly-minded, where they are sensitive at all, to be in the company of Sherwood Anderson. There is really no reason why they should have him unsettling their luxurious somnolence; in such a case I shouldn't put up with him for a second. I'd dismiss The Triumph of the Egg with a vague satisfactory re¬mark about the need to suppress these propertyless agitators. Ship 'em to Rooshia, I would advise. Or else I'd make it clear that no such books could have a place in my family. That is unanswerable, it Is, and no argument or effort can overthrow it. However, I might wish for a better world—and, luckily, it is not on my, sheet to struggle for improvements— with the earth as it is I can not con¬scientiously blame its attitude toward men who are, in essence, its bitterest critics. To put down "love those that revile you" is nothing more than a vain display of ink. Literature, as an art, as a service of beauty, has little or no place in the modern state of society; and it is just possible that it will never be of im¬portance again. Maybe, forever, it is all over, only a lingering and cher¬ished memory of something fantastic in the hearts of a dwindling few. There is—to my mind, pessimistic in cast—no evidence of even an infin¬itely delayed improvement in human¬ity; it is no more than the alternate fading and glow of a charcoal fire, a core of heat, blown on intermittently by a bellows. When the leathers of the bellows wear out, when the gases of the charcoal are exhausted, there will be a minute fleck, a dead drifting atom, of ash. Yet, against all calamity—and I have said this so often that I must seem to be falling into the repetitious habit of old age—only beauty, woven in fragile materials or in hard metal and stone, is more durable than time. A fragmentary poem will be death¬less, an arrangement of the spirit in prose will last, as our time runs, for¬ever; but that will keep no body, and very little hope, warm.